Michial and I sometimes talk about package films, parts of the movies that were cut up and repackaged by Disney. This must have been one of the first, and one that Michial was familiar with, 1958’s From All Of Us To All Of You. It features Jimmy Cricket in the segue sequences, as well as the snow and ice scene from Bambi.
Tag: Jiminy Cricket
A story about a group of bums, not hobos. Hobos travel. But still Jiminy fits nicely into this American tradition.
It took us four episodes, but I feel like we are finally a legitimate member of the Christian Humanist Network now that we have a Dante reference. And to think we could have had it back during Pinocchio if I’d only asked Michial the right question: do characters like Jiminy Cricket and Timothy Mouse, the kind guides and advocates who help our hero along, have a history in literature – or are they an invention of Walt Disney’s story team? (You may recall that the use of Jiminy was how Disney cracked the story of Pinocchio. Pinocchio is so unsympathetic in the novel that translating the book to screen was a challenge. Jiminy then became the prototype of a kind of character that we see throughout the Disney canon – including Timothy Mouse.) Michial sees a lineage all the way back to Virgil in Dante.
“The difference is Dante respects Virgil”
Civilizing affect of women in American literature exhibit B: Huck sails down the Mississippi because he doesn’t want to be civilized by Widow Douglass. But Huckleberry is also a bit of a layabout fitting into the line of noble hobos leading up to Jiminy Cricket.
Civilizing affect of women in American literature exhibit A: Rip Van Winkle goes off into the woods to get away from his horrible shrewish wife.
Michial traces the ideal of idleness that Jiminy Cricket and hobos fit into in American culture back to at least Rip Van Winkle.